Why should China matter to scholars of digital media and ageing? This book’s answer is structural and conjunctural. China presents a configuration found nowhere else: a population ageing faster than almost any in history, accelerated by the One-Child Policy; a welfare system re-individualized since the 1980s; and a state-led digital infrastructure that made smartphone use near-universal among urbanites within a decade. The cohort now entering retirement – shaped by the Cultural Revolution, the reform era and the collapse of the “iron rice bowl” (tie fan wan, the principle that the state would provide for all workers’ needs, p. 51) – brings biographical experiences to digital technology that no other national case replicates. The book is richer in empirical observation, and in the range of theory it marshals, than in the synthesis that would bind the two together – a gap this review takes as its starting point.
Guo’s study draws on three rounds of interviews in Zhengzhou, Henan (in 2018, 2022 and 2025), an online survey yielding 224 valid responses, and longitudinal case studies tracking individual participants across the full span of the fieldwork. That span matters: the research crosses three structural ruptures – pre- and post-COVID 19, the platform economy before and after Beijing’s regulatory turn, and the arrival of generative AI. Few empirical studies of digital ageing have tracked participants across such a consequential period, and this contemporaneity is rare in the field. The literature work is equally thorough, situating the material with care across gerontology, communication studies and the sociology of post-reform China. Developed from a doctoral thesis, the book makes a defensible choice to stay accessible rather than pursue maximal theoretical density – a trade-off worth understanding.
The book’s most persuasive passages are its case studies. A university administrator has turned daily life into a system of gamified missions – strapping his phone to a vibration device overnight to earn walking points on Alipay, placing a plastic egg on his plate to photograph as a “finished meal” for the platform’s food-waste campaign. He is not, by his own account, gaming a system but constructing daily purpose – treating life as “a series of small, achievable missions” that make him “feel mentally younger and more engaged” (p. 145). What this and other cases point toward is that digital engagement here is as much about managing loss and finding forward motion as it is about access or skill. One of the book’s sharpest observations reframes the problem itself: “Fraudulent information exploits the ageing population’s emotional needs – as I have noted, many live in an empty nest and are lonely” (p. 161). Vulnerability to fraud, that is, is not a deficit of digital skill but of emotional provision – a move that turns a technical problem into a relational one. This insight, and the vividness of the cases that surround it, is what makes the book valuable to scholars in adjacent fields – public health, social policy, Chinese studies – for whom these cases open a demographic that aggregate data cannot capture.
The book’s central question – how third agers have optimized their retired lives through accumulated digital capital (p. 167) – is the right one to ask, which is why the theoretical ground matters so much. The three pillars– individualization, digital capital, optimal ageing – are assigned to chapters neatly, but, as with much ambitious interdisciplinary work, the treatment tends toward theory-stacking more than theory-building: each framework is carefully introduced, yet they are rarely brought into dialogue. The digital divide section in chapter two is the clearest instance: access, skill, economic and literacy divides are catalogued separately before a conclusion that the phenomenon is “developing, complicated and dynamic” (p. 49) – accurate, but not a synthesis. Optimal ageing carries a related strain: the book opens with a broad, resource-based definition spanning individual, community and sociocultural levels (p. 29), then quietly narrows to a three-part account of physical health, mental well-being and social engagement as the empirical chapters proceed. The wider concept and the working one are never reconciled.
The deepest strain runs through individualization itself. Guo’s own material shows collectivism and individualization as simultaneously present, constrained along two axes. Within the family, the collective bounds the individual: family responsibility precedes personal digital engagement, and adult children cut household internet to control parents’ screen time (p. 162). But constraint is also institutional. One detail is telling: a participant uses a VPN to reach Twitter, Instagram and YouTube – keeping contact with a son abroad – until tighter network regulation cuts her access (p. 99). Digital capital meets a ceiling no individual skill can optimize past – a larger question the book opens but leaves for others: individualization in China unfolds within institutional limits the framework does not yet theorize. “Digital filial piety” (p. 7) is one concept through which this could be pursued. That the tension surfaces at all is a measure of what the book achieves; that it remains open is the invitation the book extends to scholars of care, mobility and digital kinship.
The limitation of scope is real. Recruiting only active smartphone users in a single second-tier city anchors the account in a privileged subset; non-users, rural third agers, seasonal migrants and those outside the hukou (household registration) system remain beyond the frame – “a vital area for future research,” as Guo acknowledges (p. 7). The growing work on mobility, care, lifestyle and mediated co-presence in Chinese and East Asian contexts is well positioned to take it up.
None of this diminishes what the book accomplishes. Guo is, in a real sense, a pioneer: she makes the case – clearly and convincingly – for why the digital lives of China’s older citizens deserve sustained scholarly attention and lays the groundwork on which that case rests. What she has built is a carefully observed, longitudinally grounded account, rare in its willingness to follow a fast-changing field across a decade of upheaval – and a framework open enough to be extended and contested. That fuller study remains to be written, and this book makes it possible to begin.
